Back on my old blog, I once wrote a piece on the famous sand-in-the-face ad for Charles Atlas’ “Dynamic Tension” mail-order fitness program.  In Salon this week, Todd Levin has done me one better:  he actually ponied up for the program and did it for a month.  You can read about the hilarious results here.

Altas was a fitness-industry pioneer, and most of us who still pontificate about this stuff (some for a fat living, others of us because we have too much spare time), owe a lot to him and his ilk.  As Levin points out, many of Atlas’ suggestions are surprisingly au courant: 

He champions hydration, condemns enriched white flour and rice, and makes a prescient argument for organic foods, instructing the reader to "exercise care and choose only those [foods] that are called organic. That is, foods from which the life-principal has not been extracted by commercial processes.

Then again, every such nugget of wisdom is countervailed by something like the following:

Atlas…also recommends dousing one's genitals with icy water each morning until you experience a "pleasant warm glow in that region."

I laughed at this, but only for a moment, because in Atlas’ absurdly ascetic recommendation I saw a pathetic, but not all that distorted, reflection of…myself.  “It’s true!” I thought, fighting back Homer-Simpson-esque tears,  “I’m so lame!” 

After all, aren’t such ideas echoed in fitness programs today, if not in form, at least in spirit?  Don’t most fitness books, videos and programs advocate pure, virtuous living, freedom from all temptation and vice?  And don’t such concepts imply a kind of figurative, if not literal, ice-water loin bath whose purpose is to gain dominion over one’s baser, hungrier, more slothful instincts?

And we buy it all, hook, line, and sinker.  Fitness will fill us with “vim and vigor, pep and punch” (Atlas again).  Fitness will make us more manly (and now, confoundingly, more womanly too).  Fitness will give us clarity and spiritual enlightenment.  Fitness will show us the way.  Rodney Yee’s angle may be spiritual; T-Nation’s may be secular. Still, the message hasn’t changed.  Atlas might seem old hat.  But sadly, no one’s come up with a more effective—or lucrative—way to sell fitness to the public.